As the book illustrates, the present situation represents the perfect confluence of circumstances for dramatic shifts in how media industries and advertisers conceptualize audiences. On the one hand, technological changes are empowering and fragmenting audiences in ways that undermine traditional analytical approaches that have focused on audiences primarily as passive media consumers. The marketplace for media audiences long has been oriented primarily around basic exposure (i.e., how many people watched, read, or listened to a particular piece of media content) serving as the central currency. But now, in an era of very small and difficult to measure audiences (due to the fragmentation that has taken place across media), and in which audiences increasingly have the tools to avoid advertisements, being in the business of selling audience exposure is becoming increasingly challenging.

However at the same time that these technological changes are undermining traditional approaches that media organizations and advertisers have taken to audiences, these same changes are opening up new windows to understanding audiences, and facilitating the development of new analytical tools that are broadening established notions of audience value beyond traditional exposure-focused approaches. Today, media organizations and advertisers are increasingly focusing on concepts such as recall, appreciation, and engagement — concepts that go well beyond basic exposure in terms of how audiences are measured, valued, and sold. New criteria for audience value are entering the marketplace as the old system buckles under the weight of massive technological change.

This is the essence of the process of audience evolution, and these are the main issues that are the focus of this book, as well as the focus of this blog. The primary purpose of the blog is to continue the discussion with recent examples and issues that were not able to make it into the final draft of the manuscript that I completed back in March of 2010 (yes, good old-fashioned book publishing still moves a bit slow). Think of the blog as Audience Evolution 1.5, if you will.

I hope everyone who visits finds the blog of interest either as a useful extension of the book or on its own as a window into some of the fundamental changes that are affecting the media, advertising, and audience measurement industries today.